Daily Life in Zambia 10/27/10

I just went through and read some of my old blogs from when I first arrived in South Africa. I had to laugh at how I describe how different everything is from my cush life in America, how difficult and challenging every little thing is. HA! That was nothing compared to life in Zambia. South Africa is Africa Lite.

I actually wrote about going to the movies in the mall during my rant on cultural differences. What a dolt.

Upon arriving in Mansa, Pastor Henry said, “Welcome to the real Africa”. He teases me that I am living in the AFnet Hotel because I have indoor plumbing and electricity, while most of the people here do not. However, the water and electricity stops working every single day, it is just a matter of when and for how long. When there is water, you fill up buckets so you have something to use when it is not working. And I have candles for when the power is out.
But don’t drink the water – it’ll make you sick. You must buy it, boil it, or add clorin to it to make it safe. I had diarrhea for the first five weeks I was here. I knew better than to drink the water but I was being hosted for meals and it would be rude not to eat and drink everything they give you since they are making a sacrifice to serve you the best of what they have. They use unsafe water in meal prep and without electricity there is no refrigeration so the food is sometimes questionable.
When vomiting and fever set in also, it was time for me to go to the hospital to get medication. My malaria test was negative so it was probably the food or water. Sorry to include you in this discussion of my bodily functions but diarrhea is a big part of daily life around here, as you can see from this mural painted on the side of a school. The children get sick fairly regularly – from malaria or unsafe water or lack of nutritious diet so they can’t fight off a common virus.

Now that I am cooking and shopping for myself I have been able to stay healthy. The new well is in (thank you Twin Lakes Church elementary school students!) so soon the orphans and I will have safe drinking water. We are just waiting for the electric company to increase the voltage to our site so we have enough energy to run the pump. Right now, even when we have power, the amount of it is not enough to read by light bulb. I can only read during the day.

What do I eat? Nshima is the staple here. Zambians adore it. It is not considered a meal unless nshima is served. This is mealie meal, a powder made out of pounding corn. In South Africa, it is called pap. In Tanzania, ugali. You add the maize meal to boiling water and keep stirring and stirring until it is impossible to move the spoon. Then you grab it with your fingers and moosh it into a ball to dip into relish (usually cooked tomato and onion). But that’s not what I eat. Too much work for almost nil nutritional value. It’s easier to throw pasta into boiling water, which I can buy at Shoprite, the only grocery store in town. The selection there is very limited. You can only get eggs if you go first thing in the morning, cheese and yogurt only if you happen to be there the same day the truck arrives, every couple of days but not regular. There is one kind of bread – white. No salad! Oh how I miss a good salad! But I shouldn’t get started on the things I miss… So that leaves cereal for breakfast, PB&J for lunch, pasta and veggies for dinner. Sorry to bore you with my menu, but people keep asking me. I stay away from the traditional foods, the little dried fishies at the market, dried caterpillar, or the village chicken - and it keeps me out of the hospital. This woman is on her way to the market to sell a big bowl of caterpillar goodness.

I do like the door to door food sales – the ladies arrive with the baskets on their head. Sometimes I don’t know what the strange food item is, and they don’t speak English to explain to me what to do with the item.
But if they have tomatoes or carrots or pineapple, I buy.

I do not have a car so I walk everywhere, like everyone else. Because it is so hot, and tennis shoes and chitenge look silly together, I wear my flip flops all the time. With the heat and the hard packed dusty dirt roads, I soon had cracked and bleeding heels. I thought it funny at first when the skin hardened and made sharp ridges. “Look, you can grate cheese on my feet”. Then the sharp bits started poking into the cracked open bits and it felt like walking on shards of glass. The ladies told me to use a stone. Now I rub my feet each day with a stone and put camphor cream on the shredded bits. Don’t ask me what’s in that. Evidently they don’t have labeling laws in Zambia so I have no idea what is in any of the products I am ingesting into, or slathering onto, my body.

My hate affair with roosters continues. Judging by the ear-plug-penetrating, ear-drum-shattering, SKAreeches of the roosters here, Zambia has clearly been cross breeding chickens with pterodactyls. And they get up even earlier here. They begin at 3:30, I guess to make sure that people are up in time for the 5:00 a.m. worship service in the church. Yes, I said FIVE a.m., every day, Monday thru Friday, they are shouting to the Lord for joy! They really take that verse seriously, a few feet away from my bedroom.

Back in California I used to think, if I slip and hit my head in the bathtub, I could be dead for a week before anyone noticed or found me. By then, my cat Charlie would be eating me. That could never happen here! People are knocking on my door all day long, checking on me or wanting something from me or just to greet me. And if I don’t answer, they go from window to window looking for me. Doesn’t matter if I am in the bathtub, on the toilet, in bed sleeping, they will find me! It is so hot here that I have to have the windows open during the day and they will reach in to move the curtain aside to look for you, yelling Madame Lisa, Madame Lisa, or the Bemba version, Ba Lisa. There is a concept that I spent 3 years in law school learning and 10 years as a lawyer arguing in court that does not exist here. There is no “reasonable expectation of privacy”. They are not being rude or insensitive to my need for personal time or space. It’s just a different culture. Everybody is in everybody’s business because they take care of each other.

Of all the embarrassing things I have admitted on this blog, this is probably the most embarrassing thing I am going to admit doing. I divulge it for several reasons: 1) to show that you do what ya gotta do for the survival of a loved one; 2) perhaps someone out there can tell me a better way to accomplish the same end; 3) maybe my method is useless and I can stop risking my health needlessly. The loved one is my laptop and each day I perform a form of CPR on it.
Because of the heat (did I mention it was really really hot here?), the windows are open which means all that previously mentioned dust and dirt blows in and covers everything in my house. When my laptop started to overheat a lot and I could hear the fan struggling to blow stuff out, I knew drastic measures must be taken. My laptop is my life line – to family, to friends, to getting my job here done. So now every day I place my mouth over the exhaust vent and suck as hard as I can to get all the dust particles out. I am allergic to dust mites so sometimes I have to use my inhaler afterwards if my airway starts to constrict. Small price to pay to keep my laptop alive.
I have two fantasies that I have concocted to adapt to daily life here. Yes, it is called living in denial, but it is what allows me to have peace of mind so please don’t burst my fantasy bubbles. The first is my magic shield mosquito net. I know that the rats, spiders, cock roaches, frogs, lizards, and mosquitos that I see in abundance flying and crawling and scurrying in my house by day, cannot penetrate the net and gnaw on me as I sleep. If if I did not firmly believe this, I would not be able to sleep at night.
I carefully wrap myself into a cocoon each night, obsessively tucking the net underneath every millimeter of my mattress, which sets on the floor. Then I emerge each morning a beautiful butterfly. Not really, but I couldn’t resist. I am not getting enough beauty sleep due to the prehistoric pterodactachickens.
And the soft breathing of a rat. My front door has a gap at the bottom about 2 inches high, so lots of critters can creep in. I put a box up against it to block their nocturnal entry. In the middle of the night, I was awakened by the eerie sound of cardboard slowly scraping across concrete. In the morning the box was in the middle of the room. The next night, I jammed a really thick blanket into the crack. In the morning, I found a shredded blanket in the middle of the room. Now I put a cement block in front of the crack. But one night I saw a furry little butt dart around the corner so he is still getting in somehow. I swear I hear him breathing right next to my pillow at night, but outside the magic net of course. And perhaps it’s not breathing, it’s probably rat laughter.

Fantasy number two involves my laundry. It is a long process that takes two days. First I wash it in the bath tub, rubbing it with a stone (no, not the same one I use to scrape my feet).
Then I hang it to dry on the clothesline, hoping today’s wind direction leaves my clothes drying upwind from the outhouse the line is attached to. EW, gross, why attach it there? It is the only patch of grass around. If I attach it over the dirt, the dirt just blows up onto it and sticks to the wet fabric so it ends up dirtier than when I started. I forgot to mention you must first separate out the “unmentionables”, that’s what they call it. My bras and granny panties must not be hung out in public for the world to see. Given the fact that they are granny panties, I am on board with this policy. I strung a second clothes line in my bedroom. With concrete floors, it doesn’t really matter if they drip on the floor. Then after the mentionables and unmentionables are dry, I have to iron them all. Sheets, socks, towels, underpants, you name it, it must be ironed. This is because when clothes are drying on the line, tiny flies lay their eggs in them. Then when you wear the item, your body heat causes the eggs to hatch and they burrow into your skin, causing redness and itching. Zambians iron to prevent this from happening. So I iron. My theory on this is that the extreme heat from the iron causes the eggs to combust and all the little baby fly particles immediately completely evaporate into the air allowing me to put on a pristine garment. This is better than the alternative, that I am walking around with melted dead fly embryos in my underpants.

I don’t mean to make it sound like my life here is horrible. It is hard, but very far from horrible. As I said in my last blog, I love the people of Zambia. The way they have made me feel part of their community, it will be hard to leave them all in a few weeks. I am also in complete awe of them. After long days of walking and hauling; shopping, chopping and cooking for 75; teaching, singing, and playing with children ages 3-18, I am exhausted. But not the amazing volunteers, they keep right on going and right on smiling. Everything I am doing, they are doing alongside me but in high heels with a child strapped to their back. Then they still have a 30-45 minute walk home to the village and still have to cook a meal for their own family.
And you know what I am going to say next, what totally makes it all worthwhile – the children! To see the change in them after just two days in the program was miraculous. This morning my eyes misted over as I heard their little voices sweetly singing. So I will gladly keep sucking dust, ironing fly babies, wrangling rats, and stoning my feet if I can keep seeing their beautiful smiles…